Forests of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail

Hunter Stanke

2021

Introduction

The Appalachian National Scenic Trail (APPA) traverses more than 2,170 miles across the highest ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains, from Georgia to Maine. Along the way it crosses through 14 states, eight National Forests, six National Parks, six Inventory and Monitoring networks, a National Wildlife Refuge, three Tennessee Valley Authority properties, one Smithsonian Institute property, and over 280 local jurisdictions. The Trail is managed in partnership with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) and its 30 affiliated Trail-maintaining clubs under an extraordinary cooperative management system that provides for an annual contribution of nearly 200,000 hours by more than 5,000 volunteers.

The trail’s length, north-south alignment, changes in elevation, and numerous peaks and ridges it crosses along this ancient mountain chain creates one of the most biodiverse units of the National Park System.

The Appalachian Trail is uniquely situated to serve as a barometer for the air, water, and biological diversity of the Appalachian Mountains and much of the eastern United States. That is what makes the A.T. an attractive place to explore scientific questions, and which lead to the creation of the A.T. MEGA-Transect. To this end, the National Park Service and ATC, in cooperation with the USDA Forest Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and a host of other agencies and organizations, are focusing their energies on assessing, understanding, and monitoring the vast wealth of natural resources present on the Appalachian Trail’s 270,000-acre land base.

The Appalachian Trail is monitored through the Northeast Temperate Inventory and Monitoring Network. The goals of monitoring along the trail include:

The Challenge

The large, but narrow configuration of the APPA makes a ground-based plot monitoring program logistically and financially infeasible for the National Park Service to implement. In light of that challenge, the North East Temperate Inventory and Monitoring Network developed a data acquisition protocol to track the overall condition of forest resources along the Appalachian Trail using plot-based data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program.

Beginning to implement this monitoring program, we found a lack of publicly available tools to compute complex, space-time indexed summaries from FIA data. We created rFIA to address this challenge. We thank the North East Temperate Inventory and Monitoring Network and the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Division for their contribution to the development of rFIA, and for providing technical and financial support to implement the Appalachian National Scenic Trail forest health monitoring protocol.

Using rFIA, we leverage the Forest Inventory and Analysis database to assess the status and trends in forest condition along the Appalachian Trail and neighboring lands. Specifically, we estimate the following attributes within ecoregion subsections which intersect the Appalachian Trail:

  1. Live tree abundance and biomass
  1. Species diversity of live trees
  1. Tree vital rates
  1. Forest demographic rates
  1. Regeneration abundance
  1. Snag abundance
  1. Down woody debris abundance
  1. Invasive Plant abundance
  1. Stand structural stage distributions

Anticipated use of results

Get the Data!

Download all data, code, and results from this project HERE!

Live tree abundance and biomass

Species diversity

Structural stage distributions

Tree vital rates

Forest demographic rates

Regeneration abundance

Snag abundance

Down woody material abundance

Invasive plant abundance